54th Parliament Statistics:
155
Sitting Days.
177
Bills considered by this Parliament.
Estimate as of 2025-12-26Last Updated: 28 January 2026 (Should update weekly).
Who are you, why do you care?
When the New Zealand Parliament goes into urgency, it allows the typical process of lawmaking to be expedited. This means that steps such as public consultation (when the public can give feedback on proposed laws) and select committee review (where a smaller group of MPs scrutinise a bill in detail) can be skipped or shortened.
Urgency is designed to allow the government to pass legislation quickly in response to unexpected or genuinely urgent situations. Recent events that warranted urgency include the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2019 terror attacks in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
In recent months however, urgency has been increasingly used by the 54th Parliament to bypass public consultation and select committee hearings in order to rush the coalition government’s legislative agenda through Parliament.
I care about this issue, as do many New Zealanders, because the urgency process removes the public's ability to have their say and makes it harder for opposition parties to scrutinise legislation before it becomes law. While many laws have been passed under urgency, not all of them appear to be genuinely urgent.
I am not an expert coder; however, I could not find an existing tool like this online, so I built one myself to track urgency statistics in the 54th Parliament. I plan to make more NZPOL tools in the future, and would appreciate any support, either on my social media or by buying me a coffee!
The Statistics
As of 28 January 2026, the 54th Parliament of New Zealand has officially sat for 155 days since it was formed on 3rd December 2023.
In that time, the Parliament which is led by a coalition of the National Party, The ACT Party, and New Zealand First has put the parliament into urgency on 19 occasions to pass bills without the normal amount of consultation and scrutiny.
This makes up 12.26% of all sitting days, and affected 58.76 of all bills that have been through this Parliament. The most recent urgency session being 61 days ago on 09 Dec 2025.
These statistics are scraped from the New Zealand Parliament website, and is updated daily by the NZPT urgency tracker. The urgency tracker code can be seen on Github for those more technically minded. The tracker is a passion project by CJ and will eventually have information about bills affected.